Five Boys by Mick Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

fun.
    Half the posters on the classroom wall warned about germs bringing the nation to its knees. Perhaps they could claim that they really
were
fumigating him. “Germs” and “Germans” were close enough to be almost indistinguishable and if Bobby wasn’t quite German he was about as foreign as they come.
    When they’d finished, the Boys pushed back their gas masks and wiped the sweat from their brows. Bobby lay in his hutch, sniveling and sodden. His hair was plastered to his head. The Boys had stopped their spraying but Bobby just kept on crying—kept on chugging like an idling engine—and as they got to their feet and prepared to leave the Boys felt their guilt creep toward irritation, then anger at his refusal to acknowledge that, if they had wanted, they could have done a great deal worse to him.
    Hector tapped his boot against the chicken wire. “And don’t you go
telling
,” he said.
    His words didn’t seem to make much of an impression. The evacuee just kept crying and shaking until, eventually, the Boys got sick of the sight of him and headed home.
    When Aldred returned, five or ten minutes later, Bobby lay perfectly still. His visitor looked in at him, then sat with his back against the chicken wire and started fiddling with his shoelaces.
    “It wasn’t poison,” he said over his shoulder. “It was just water from a water tank.”
    Without looking Bobby could tell that it was the boy with the freckles and the bulging eyes.
    “Where are the others?” he said.
    “Having their tea,” said Aldred. “Mine’s not ready.”
    Neither boy spoke. Aldred continued fussing with his shoelaces, until Bobby lifted his face from the dirt.
    “Are you going to let me out?” he said.
    Aldred looked up and down the allotments and shook his head. “Not just yet,” he said.
    Aldred turned and directed his enormous eyes at Bobby.
    “You come from London, don’t you?” he said.
    Until these last few weeks Bobby had never thought of himself as a Londoner, but down here everyone seemed to think he lived right around the corner from Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square.
    Bobby nodded and the boy with the freckles and the big eyes nodded back at him.
    “So,” he said. “You reckon you can do it?”
    Bobby had no idea what he was talking about.
    “Do what?” he said.
    “London,” said Aldred and opened his eyes even wider.
    “Do London in a day.”
    • • •
    Aldred Crouch’s overactive thyroid was never going to be treated when his father took such pride in never having missed a day’s work through illness and had trouble enough making ends meet without paying doctors’ bills. An old woman once stopped Aldred in Totnes High Street and told him how she used to have a husband whose eyes used to stick out of
his
head and how
he
ended up with a goiter the size of a grapefruit under his chin. Aldred did his best not to dwell on such weird encounters, but the other Boys went out of their way to remind him of his condition at every turn. As far as his father was concerned his son’s eyes just stuck out of his head much the same as his grandad’s. They didn’t seem to cause the boy any discomfort, apart from a bit of aching just before a cold snap, which some of the allotment keepers took as a sign to cover their vegetables.
    The first time Bobby laid eyes on Aldred he thought he must have slammed his finger in a door, and had often wondered since what it must be like to be so excruciatingly open-eyed, so wildly awake. But by the time Aldred opened the hutch and Bobby went stumbling down the lane he would have been happy never to see the boy again.
    Any qualms he might have had about betraying the Five Boys were effectively put aside, for even if he’d come up with a story to explain his being so late, his sodden clothes and his bleeding fingers, he would not have been able to sustain it.
    “Good God,” said Miss Minter as he staggered into the parlor. “Who did that to you?”
    “The Five Boys,”